Number 3 The Digest: How school and teachers can use data to inform teaching in ways that lead to improvements in student achievement-ACER

Number 3 The Digest: How school and teachers can use data to inform teaching in ways that lead to improvements in student achievement-ACER

Key points that I take from this article are...

• A characteristic of good data is its potential to help teachers make good decisions about children's learning. Data tell a story... The two questions uppermost in a teacher's mind should be: What does it all mean and; how can we use it to improve children's achievements?
• Teachers need to be explicit about how they are going to teach differently to improve achievement.
• Teachers need to look closely to see if their teaching matches the needs of the students in THIS year's class.
• To go back to identifying the "hot spots" in subject data e.g., Numeracy hotspots for Place Value
• At pupil level effective assessment...informs individual targets, highlights weaknesses for individuals and groups, provides evidence that supports decisions and focus resources and teaching and informs setting and grouping of students.
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Professional Learning with Professor Bridie Raban: Neuroscience & Education: Directions that could lead us astray. T3'17

Professional Learning with Professor Bridie Raban: 
Neuroscience & Education: Directions that could lead us astray.       Term 3 2017
At Copthorne, Waitangi     From her article of the same title.

Ten key things about the brain:

1.  More information doesn't mean more learning. Connections need to be made. Too much prompting is confusing. Demonstrations are needed. Eliminate all unnecessary talk.
2. The brain is a highly dynamic organism. Encourage it to move from slow to fast processing.
3. Emotion influences the ability to learn. Text: How children Succeed". Emotions are the organisers of information. If children experience failure, children will wait for the teacher to tell them the answer.
4. Mistakes are an essential part of learning. Allow for multiple tries. Concentrate on HOW to do it effectively. Don't focus on mistakes. "You do it like this".
5. The brain needs novelty: This generates dopomine, the feel good hormone. We must have challenge and positive experiences in literacy. Use a variety of materials and modes.
6. There are no learning styles: We need a variety of learning opportunities. More senses need to be involved.
7. Use it or lose it principle: Information not used is lost. Life long learning is important.
8. Learning is social: Peer collaboration and genuine conversations ties to activities are needed. Emotional interactedness leads to great learning.
9. Learning is best when innate abilities are capitalised on. Detection of patterns and meaningful contexts are needed.
10. Learning changes the structure of the brain. Independence thrives. Learning is not just cognitive.

Next steps for me as teacher:

1. Factor into lessons, the realisation that emotion influences learning. Pleasant yet stimulating learning opportunities will ensure that information is stored well and can be retrieved well.
2. Novelty: Go all out to offer a variety of materials and modes to add the novelty factor. Youtube tutorials have provided a different "novelty" factor to the teaching and learning of Maths etc.

Text: Why I prefer pre-teaching to remediation for struggling students.

Why do I prefer pre-teaching to remediation for struggling students.
By Kustin Minkel                 Education Week Teacher-Published Online: May 18, 2015

Key points taken from text:

• Quote: The true antidote to failure is success. Once these students learn to read and do math, they can take a breath and begin to enjoy it.
• Remediation means to do more of the same with these students, going over the early skills that they seemed to have missed the first time around. They are disadvantaged by the system of penalising students by making them do extra homework, attending after school sessions, doing holiday work etc.
• Pre-teaching is a more effective and fun way of helping students catch up.
• By front loading new learning, ahead of the class learning,  the teacher makes the child an expert.
• Front loading new learning helps the teacher de-bug potential obstacles to whole class learning
• teach it, see who doesn't get it, then help those kids in a small group or one-on-one-has its place.
• Pre-teaching changes the child's view of him/herself.

What can I do differently in my teaching practice?

1. Watch for those who struggle and quickly workshop with them to clarify the learning before the next lesson.
2. Pre-empt obstacles to learning, get with the small group of strugglers and pre-teach the upcoming learning.
3. Create an ethos of putting the struggling students in a position of knowledge and teacher. Build their self-esteem through success.

Clarity: What does it look like? T3 '17

Clarity: What does it look like?     Being clear about what is to be learnt.
Staff mini-enquiry for Term 3

Resources : Evaluation Associates website for rubrics of clarity in teaching and learning. Also teacher capability matrices
TKI

How do we know they are learning?
Children need to say where they are in the progressions.
Narrow the progressions down to a relevant (single) skill/strategy etc across a number of levels.
This will enable them to identify their next learning step and reflect on what they have achieved.
Their learning will be embedded in the progressions. Self and peer assessment focuses on a small number of learning steps and is relevant to success criteria and progressions.

"Self assessment is when a student looks at their own work and recognises the quality of what they have done. This enables them to also see what they haven't done and therefore to adjust their work so that it does meet the standard of the quality required. It can happen at any stage of the process". Evaluation Associates

Next learning steps for me as teacher:

1. Take what Iwill be teaching for the week and make progressions for it in the modelling books or on sheets of paper on the classroom wall.
2. Explore TKI for self assessments."Assessment on line" for ideas, powerpoint etc
3. Develop specific self-assessments using a variety of modes.
4. Introduce kiddie-speak rubrics to identify writing learning and goals.
5. Identify where I am on the clarity rubric prior to observations. 
6. Set my own goal from the rubric.

Digital Fluency Week 3 Reflection

8.8.18  Reflecting on Week 3 of the Digital Fluency Intensive

What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy?

Dorothy Burt spoke about the concept of 'create'.

Key points for me to take away...

We need to engage students, i.e., hook them in to learning and creating. Everyone benefits from creating.
Forming original ideas through creativity and exploration.
Creativity empowers learners.

Teacher creativity 

Create learning opportunities based on the internal and external lives of the children. 
Tactile unpacking of creativity. We want school to be wonderful. 
Kids should want to be at school. 
"The heart of the matter"-documentary on Maori TV. It is not about play and exploring vs digital. It is about exploring the learning.

Create is a doing word and it involves the whole body. What does that look like? The graphic that emerged from the collaborative document symbolises the pedagogy of ...
1. Creativity empowers learning
2. Digital Technologies empowers creativity.

We can't go from planning to the kids brain. There must be a physical involvement to explore the learning.
Motivate students to engage with the curriculum. Manaiakalani intentionally uses  modern technologies to enable and capture creativity. 
Students are creators of content not merely consumers.
The 'Deep Thinking Competencies' are an avenue for expression.
Sisomo...sight, sound and motion are components for creativity.

Good quote:
"Creativity focuses on the process of forming original ideas though exploration and creativity" -Kohl 2008

What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional? 

Google Slides
The learning about Google slides affirmed what I knew already but the opportunity to create a slide show was welcome practice. This was very relevant for me. The message here was to keep each slide simple with few but carefully selected words and a simple image. Handy Hints included the following...
Themes should be relevant and headings the same. Could use slides for lessons that detail the date, the WALT and the exemplar, possibly a picture of the journal/text. Great idea. If we search an image with gif, we will get animated images. If we search with PNG we have transparent background.

YouTube

Dorothy spoke about creating on Youtube, as a teacher. Embed the YouTube link on the class site and the children will watch it there. Videos must go to Google Drive and set permissions on the folder (visible to anyone with link). Students can go onto youtube for some competitions but that needs monitoring. The school must take down any images that any person finds objectionable.

We set up our own YouTube channel and created play lists. This was very helpful for storing my many videos for different subjects and for linking with my students later.

Google Drawing

We made a practice page with animation and an " About Me" button. I was not sure what the purpose of the button was but it is inserted at the bottom of this post. 

Screencastify

This will help me capture instructions for doing the many new things from this course (Rewindable learning).

This the link for the Screencastify recording of Kerry explaining how to embed a video or image into my blog...
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NwNqariFaElWbqrc6Uw21iLAvp4ZysUr/view?usp=sharing

What did I learn that could be used with my learners , capability or workflow in my personal life?

Google Drawing: Examples for use- Geometrical shapes used to draw a robot.

Google Slides: Could be used for shared lessons; Maths problems, writing exemplars and WALTs, animations, school TV notices, game of jeopardy etc




YouTube Play lists: Used to create play lists for different subjects e.g., dance, music aspects, maths tutorials

"Story path" online learning spaces for parents at ECE level. Learning stories of experiences and learning/creating. 

Screencastify: A very handy way of recording peer or teacher instructions for revisiting later and consolidating new learning..

Esther's DFI Week 2 reflection

Reflection Questions for Week 2

• What did I learn that increased my understanding of Manaiakalani kaupapa and pedagogy

Dorothy explained the  place of “Learn” in Manaiakalani. Her video is contained in the agenda for the day. It is future focussed and is about increasing teacher effectiveness and accelerating learning outcomes in a digital environment.

Recognise: Teacher and student competence in learning

Turbocharge: The digital component-create

Amplify: The share feature

Schools need to have their own definition of “Learning” on their landing page or school site.

Higher Order thinking is to the fore e.g., Blooms Taxonomy

• What did I learn that could improve my confidence, capability or workflow as a professional?

Confidence and Capability:

The course was helpful in the following ways....

Workflow:

Bookmarks- We looked at how to use bookmarks and organise bookmark folders that contain resources and links.

Calendars- We used settings on Google calendar to make appointments and send invitations to others. I will set up a Senco calendar for scheduling key tasks and invite people to IEP meetings etc. I might share this with the specialist teacher too.

I will sync calendars to my phone. I was able to send a hangout invitation using the calendar, which was a first.

Hangouts: This was definitely a steep learning curve for me today. It was my first time using quicktime. Etiquette for hangout needs to be understood by all before starting. Having different roles for the creation of this movie was interesting. I could see that this could be an effective means of sharing/collaborating once my capability is improved.

Small group hangout video

• What did I learn that could be used with my learners , capability or workflow in my personal life?

The hangouts potentially have real benefits for me as Senco, to share and collaborate for the benefit of students with additional needs (SWANs). They could be used for IEPs if parties could not meet although it could disadvantage parents who couldn't attend. Groups of students across the school could collaborate about a topic, perhaps as experts or expert to novices, or about a shared responsibility such as the PB4L group.

Esther: Digital Fluency Intensive Week 1

Digital Fluency Intensive WEEK 1

Content/App.	Task	What I Learned
	Google Keep Installed on phone and laptop. Explored possibilities	Pinning, Sharing, Collaborate button. Recordings into google doc or email. Photo of a page, use photo, grab image on text, it types from photo. Photo album, include on blog. Keep handy links/URLs in keep to use later. Create a comment and a link about surface features to insert in student work.
	Profile adjusted All email accounts entered Photo entered. Task bar set up.
	Teach documents to students. Set up student folders that are shared with teachers. Group stories Create a chain doc. By sharing a common template with specific people and someone else contributes to it Control shift V= remove format. Docs as a tool for creating visual media.	Highlight text, Command C, format it first before pasting as paste without formatting. Copied docs= put your initial before the title. Do not underline anything. Highlight title and “Normal Text” for heading 1, subheadings= Heading 2. Put cursor before first title, go to insert, table of contents. Your headings create URLs Command F for searching keyword e.g., digital Incorporate the chain activity into class programme- narratives, facts….
	Clean up your drive by making year folders Disclosure arrows, Folders to be shared	Transparency for all planning by sharing folders
	Adjusted my blog to make Teaching as Inquiry as a visible page The correct template has been set up	Use tables to manage my images. Infographics: use png images to colour the background (Table properties) Only access images via Explore Tool We made an infographic We did the scavenger hunt to try out the various Explore features
Skill checklist	Using the “explore tool”	Try out: Voice type, Add ons, Script editor, citation tools.
The 4 Goals of DFI	Our teachers are supported to acquire fluency using the basic tools our young people use for learning Our teachers are supported to acquire fluency using the basic tools required for effective teaching, planning, assessment and professional learning Our teachers are supported to understand how digital technologies used effectively can have a significant impact on accelerating achievement outcomes Our teachers are supported to understand how the Manaiakalani pedagogy and kaupapa has been co-constructed over more than a decade to maximise the impact of effective teaching and learning in a digital learning environment.
To do Next:	Try out some of the above app.s.